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Updated: Oct 11, 2025
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Published on: September 28, 2018
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Empathy-based counterspeech can reduce racist hate speech in a social media field experiment
Dominik Hangartner1,2, Gloria Gennaro3,2, Sary Alasiri3
1Center for Comparative and International Studies, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland; dominik.hangartner@gess.ethz.ch.
Summary
Empathy-based counterspeech effectively reduces online hate speech by encouraging message deletion and decreasing future posts. This study highlights empathy
Area of Science:
- Social Science
- Communication Studies
- Online Behavior
Background:
- Online hate speech poses significant risks to individuals and public discourse.
- Current mitigation strategies like content moderation have limitations.
- Counterspeech is an emerging alternative, but lacks empirical evidence.
Purpose of the Study:
- To experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of different counterspeech strategies.
- To assess the impact of empathy, consequences, and humor on hate speech.
- To inform the design of effective online hate speech interventions.
Main Methods:
- Randomized controlled trial involving 1,350 English-speaking Twitter users.
- Interventions included empathy, warning of consequences, and humor-based counterspeech.
- Measured retrospective deletion and prospective creation of xenophobic hate speech over 4 weeks.
Main Results:
- Empathy-based counterspeech significantly increased retrospective deletion of hate speech.
- Empathy-based counterspeech reduced the prospective creation of hate speech.
- Humor and consequence-based strategies showed no consistent effects.
Conclusions:
- Empathy is a key component in reducing online exclusionary behavior.
- Empathy-based counterspeech offers a promising avenue for mitigating online hate speech.
- Findings provide evidence-based insights for designing future interventions.
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